Cooking With Richard

This is the lemon from the lemon tree:

Easter weekend was a wash-out because of the high winds, rain and snow:

We went to the Rose and Crown in Kings Langley for beer and greasy pub fish and chips and ale pie:

Previously …

For the past few weeks N-sama has been wondering about the strange secret project I’ve been engaged in. Well, here it is, revealed to the world for the very first time:

JONESFORTH

The internet in all its glory forgets my first brush with FORTH, which happened in around 1981 or ’82 with ARTIC’s FORTH. I still have my original cassette and manual.

Ever since then I wondered how it worked …

Only now have I found out and become enlightened.

Please somebody buy me a Jupiter ACE.

M-kun gave us some Lindt 85% cocoa butter chocolate and we partook in a taste test to see whether it tasted better with red wine or tea. I can categorically state that the chocolate goes well with wine, the bitter cocoa being mellowed by the wine. On the other hand the bitterness is enhanced by drinking tea, and that combination does not fare well at all.

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We had a romantic dinner to celebrate the first anniversary of this boggie:

This is shepherds pie made from the lamb:

Bombardier “Satanic Mills” is a pleasant caramel-flavoured porter ale. Recommended!

“Satanic mills” is a reference to the hymn Jerusalem, which in turn refers to the poem “And did those feet in ancient time” by William Blake.

Remember folks, Every time you masturbate… God kills a kitten. There’s a lot of dead kittens at the moment.

More domo:

This review of McEwans Champion sums it up really – bad head, becomes better once it settles and as you drink it.

Although N-sama made delicious karage today, my posting today concerns a special cheese made with Penicillium roqueforti from caves in Larzac, France. This Roquefort cheese is soft and melting in the mouth, with that wonderful fatty, moldy taste. It goes well with red wine.

Black Sheep Brewery is an independent brewery close to the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
They make this distinctive, malty, hoppy dark beer; the best bit is the picture of the stranded sheep on the label:

A very acquired taste, certainly not for everyone.

Badger Ales brewed in Dorset.

Blandford Fly is a light ale spiced with ginger, tasting somewhere between ginger and cloves. I’m sending a bottle to N-sama’s dad.

I might try their recipe for ginger cake.

Update: This is how the ginger cake turned out.

I had to cut off the top which burned slightly. The recipe says to cook it for an hour, but next time I’d be inclined to reduce that to 45-50 minutes. The result is pleasant – the taste is rather too much treacle and not enough ginger or spice. That may be to do with the fact that I made the “mixed spice” up (I just added mace, allspice, cinnamon and ground coriander in mostly equal proportions); and I used quite a lot of ground up fresh ginger instead of using ground ginger.

We’ve got a huge box of empty wine and beer bottles for recycling after the BBQ! I think Yuka drank most of it :-)

St Peter’s Golden ale is a light, easy to drink ale for the ladies. And you can turn the bottle into an attractive olive oil pourer.

I’ve started having just one cup of (ordinary) tea (warning: shit website) every day for medicinal purposes. Back when I drank tea, I used to go through 5-10 cups of it every day. Now that I’m only drinking one, I can actually taste it. It’s like my grandmother’s house which always smelled of freshly brewed pots of tea.

Notice also the very collectible Enron mug, which I stole from Enron’s offices, back in the day.

Fuller’s London Porter is a lovely dark porter ale brewed in Chiswick, West London. It’s a creamy, chocolatey meal-in-a-bottle.
In the 18th and 19th centuries people would have drunk porter ales like this instead of water (the water being rather unsafe to drink at the time).